Travis had a great second week of school and it is amazing to see him working so diligently on his school work so that he does not have to worry about falling behind while he is out.  Mrs. Mills is great about preparing weekly assignments for the kids so Travis knows what he has to work on.  We even made it to the ECC Back to School night on Wednesday.  There are so many good kids in the class and we know most of their families already.

Tyler finished his first week back at school as a big 8^th grader.  He is becoming so mature but it is still hard to believe that he is one year away from High School.  Wow!  He is taking some advanced classes again this year with High School Geometry and Honors English.  He is also taking Leadership again which combines ASB (Associated Student Body) and Broadcasting so it allows him to do some pretty cool stuff while he is involved in most of the school events.

We had a little bit of a scare when checking in on Thursday for Round 3 of Chemotherapy to start on Friday.  Before we meet with the Doctor, they run routine lab work (CBC and Electrolytes) so they know where we are starting from.  But apparently Travis’ blood counts had dropped quite a bit since he was released from quarantine the last time and they were very close to not being able to start the third round of chemo.  His ANC or Absolute Neutrophil Count (first responders of the infection fighters) was at 1008 and they will only do chemo if it 1000 or higher so we dodged a potential delay.  We know Travis would not have minded the delay but we keep telling him that every day and every treatment gets us one step closer to being done.

So on Friday, Lynne and Travis checked in to the hospital around 9am and were admitted to our room for the next several days.  You may think that being in the hospital over the weekend, let alone a holiday weekend, is a bummer but it actually works out well for us.  Things tend to slow down around there with the number of patients, traffic, etc. and it allows us to come and go without having to worry about missing work or school so that we can support Travis the best we can.  Besides, there was a heat wave in San Diego County over the Labor Day weekend so we appreciated the comforts of air conditioning at the hospital.

Things got off to a little bit of a slower start and we did not begin the chemo infusion until around 4pm.  They have to make sure Travis is fully hydrated before they start as it is very important to continuously flush the body’s system throughout the process.  After our experience last round, they decided to change up the anti-nausea efforts and prescribed a steroid along with a new medication called Palonosetron.  It seems that with those two combined with the Marinol and the Cisplatin reduction down to 75% of the original dose for this round, Travis did amazingly well.  He had no real nausea symptoms, was eating something at each meal and was walking around and outside multiple times through the weekend.  Amazing!

The original plan was that they were going to keep him in the hospital until Tuesday to make sure he was fully hydrated before he went home.  Then they scheduled 2 days of home health care so that they could run fluids overnight on Tuesday and Wednesday.  But when the doctor came in on Monday to check on him and with all of his Blood Counts and Eltrolytes looking good, they let us go home on Monday afternoon.  They even de-accessed his port which meant we did not need the home health care to come.  Once they saw how good Travis was doing, it was Time to Flee After Round 3.

It was a great feeling for Travis to get home and see Cisco and sleep in his own bed.  Same for the rest of us too!

Thanks,

Tony and Lynne